[Jach]

A friend let me host a site on his server, I learned to use FTP (with a firefox add-on he recommended) to copy up HTML files. Later he saw how much duplication I was doing and showed me the humble include statement while using PHP, and pointed towards a book, and I learned to program that way by uploading PHP scripts and running them by visiting their URL. It was some time later before I succeeded in installing a local WAMP stack, even later switching to Linux at home, but if that was a prerequisite I might have bounced. Web technology even just from the backend perspective was a huge enabler.

Still, I don't know if such things are the biggest obstacles, I remember the conceptual hurdle of the for loop syntax being pretty difficult to overcome. (I crashed my friend's server once with a very long loop echoing stuff each iteration that I might have tried opening in multiple tabs at once too.)

I've also seen such initial setup hurdles justified as filters: if you can't handle this, well, programming is full of such obstacles (bigger, smaller, or about the same size left unstated), so maybe it's for the best you just give up now since you probably won't make it. I generally don't like that excuse, and appreciate that getting into programming has been made so easy, but at the same time when a lot of effort has been made into making something so easy (even if not quite as easy as it could be, or as easy as something else) and people still bounce off their first setup difficulty, I sympathize with those who think good riddance, especially if the person isn't an absolute beginner. The horse and water adage always applies.